Post-Darwinist

This blog provides stories that Denyse O'Leary, a Toronto-based journalist, has found to be of interest, as she covers the growing intelligent design controversy. It supports her book By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg 2004). Does the universe - and do life forms - show evidence of intelligent design? If so, Carl Sagan was wrong and so is Richard Dawkins. Now what?

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Monday, December 01, 2008

Just up at The Mindful Hack - flap over non-materialist neuroscience grows

Consciousness: A physicist on the recent New Scientist flap re non-materialist neuroscience

Neuroplasticity: Growing public recognition greets Norman Doidge's new book (Secular humanists getting in on the new "mind" thing?)

Note: Posting was light recently because I have been writing a report for a client. Just catching up. Back soon.

On the nature of life

A mechanic was removing a cylinder head from the motor of a motorcycle when he spotted a well known heart surgeon in his shop. The surgeon was there waiting for the service manager to come take a look at his bike. The mechanic shouted across the garage,

"Hey Doc, can I ask you a question?"

The surgeon, a bit surprised, walked over to the mechanic working on the motorcycle. The mechanic straightened up, wiped his hands on a rag and asked,

"So, Doc, look at this engine. I open its heart, take valves out, fix 'em, put 'em back in and when I finish, it works just like new. So how come I get such a small salary and you get the really big bucks, when you and I are doing basically the same work?"

The surgeon paused, smiled and leaned over and whispered to the mechanic ...

"Try doing it with the engine running!"

So why can't the patient's system just be shut down the way a machine is turned off? Doctors can indeed place a person's body on bypass, in a technical state of death, but they must in reality keep it alive. Once the cells die, the hope of recovery ends - and that is especially significant for brain cells. So the body cannot really just be shut off, the way a machine can.

Over time, any design is going to decay. If one wants a design to persist over time, there are only two options: a) continually intervene to deposit replacement designs or, b) design them such that they self-perpetuate. The self-perpetuation of a design is called replication or reproduction. There are good design reasons for using this strategy. Daniel Koshland, a scientist from the University of California, Berkeley, explains the importance of reproduction:

"This is not the only way the living system regenerates. The constant resynthesis of its proteins and body constituents is not quite perfect, so the small loss for each regeneration in the short run becomes a larger loss overall for all the processes in the long run, adding up to what we call aging. So living systems, at least the ones we know, use a clever trick to perfect the regeneration process-that is, they start over.. Starting over can be a cell dividing, in the case of Escherichia coli", or the birth of an infant for Homo sapiens. By beginning a new generation, the infant starts from scratch, and all the chemical ingredients, programs, and other constituents go back to the beginning to correct the inevitable decline of a continuously functioning metabolizing system. (emphasis added) [pp. 23-24]"

Reproduction is the means to forward a design into the future. Yet because of the inevitability of mutation, and its effects, replication over large spans of time will lead to evolution. It would thus seem that a good designer would take this "problem" and turn it into something to be exploited or used. This is just one example to illustrate that Intelligent Design and evolution may complement, rather than contradict each other. Lie itself could have been designed and evolution, by natural selection, would have subsequently followed. What's more, life might even have been designed in such away that Darwinian evolution was recruited to carry out distinct design objectives, meaning that evolution could have been "rigged by design." Or perhaps evolutionary mechanisms themselves may have been designed. How could we ever hope to address such fascinating possibilities?

How could we ever hope to address such fascinating possibilities? Well, we could try looking at the evidence.

Darwinian evolution would likely only work well in a living system or ecology if governed by an underlying mechanism that determines the desired end state (or, possibly, an acceptable range of end states).

For example, one might simulate Darwinian evolution for an airplane design - as long as we have ruled out outcomes like "wildly successful at replicating, but doesn't fly, and spreads massive ecological destruction worldwide, everywhere it goes."* The history of life on Earth suggests that something seems to inhibit such designs.

*And no, eco-nuts, don't write to tell me that humans cause ecological destruction worldwide. Quite the contrary. Humans have greatly increased the diversity of species,subspecies, and varieties worldwide (for good or ill), and are the only species that has ever attempted to prevent other species from extinction.

The only species (?) whose complete destruction we humans ever intentionally engineered was the smallpox virus. And about conserving the others, we are learning. So get a life, econuts!